We now have a list of derivatives and some information about them. A list of derivatives hiding away in a corner of the wiki is not that useful. Better would be to aggregate the available information about derivatives and present it in Debian infrastructure in a way that makes the derivatives visible to Debian contributors and useful to them. Got an idea about how we can do that? Add it below!

The code being written to help integrate the census into Debian infrastructure is available in git under the DEX project:

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dex/census.git

Status

Currently the census is only minimally used for integration of derivatives with Debian:

Some information about derivatives has been manually integrated:

Planet Debian derivatives

Aggregates all the developer and main blogs of all derivatives in one location on http://planet.debian.org/deriv/. The derivatives census scripts perform the following steps:

  1. download the census pages
  2. look for items related to blogs
  3. find if there are RSS feeds on those pages
  4. download the derivatives logos
  5. generate a new planet config file
  6. resize the logos to generate planet heads

A human should then review the feeds and any make changes needed to Planet Debian SVN.

Ideas

Packages

Aggregate all the derivative's sources.list snippets and integrate them into the following:

Bugs

Link to the derivatives bug trackers from the PTS so that Debian folks can find potential problems in their packages. This might be hard since it can be rare for derivatives to provide mappings between a bug report and the source package it applies to.